Carlos Silvestre Frenk CBE FRS (born 27 October 1951 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge, and spent his early research career in the United States, before settling permanently in the United Kingdom. He joined the Durham University Department of Physics in 1986 and since 2001 has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University.
Frenk is particularly notable for his work around galaxy formation, including his use of complex computer simulations to test theories on the origins and evolution of the universe, thus helping to resolve disputes among theoretical models. Among the most prolific and frequently cited authors in astronomy and space science, Frenk has written more than 500 scientific articles; he is a co-author on 5 of the 100 most cited papers ever published within his field.
As a pioneer in computational astrophysics, Frenk, alongside Marc Davis, George Efstathiou, and Simon White, published a series of influential papers that established the validity of the cold dark matter hypothesis through computer modelling.
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, Frenk has received numerous awards and is regularly tipped as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cosmology and the public dissemination of basic science.
He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2014. Other awards include the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal of the Paris Observatory (2007), the George Darwin Lectureship (2010), the Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2010), the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2011), the Max Born Prize of the German Physical Society (2017), the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2020), and the Rumford Medal (2021).
